Improvement in screening performance: the importance of appropriate feedback in screening mammography

摘要

Abstract: After a brief formal training period screeningmammographers are expected to further improve theirskill as a result of learning from experience. However,it has been found that little improvement in screeningperformance occurs after initial training. One possiblereason for this lack of improvement is becausemammographers often receive no individual feedback ontheir performance during routine screening practice.While exposure to stimuli without feedback issufficient to induce some types of learning, in othercases learning as a result of simple experience may notoccur. In this paper we report two studies designed toinvestigate the importance of feedback for the learningof two visual detection tasks. Experiment oneinvestigated whether the provision of feedback improvedobservers' ability to detect target features in x rays.Results indicated that in the absence of feedback noimprovement in detection accuracy occurred, but thatwhen feedback was provided performance improved.Experiment two examined the effects of feedback on thelearning of a probabilistic target detection task usingcomputer generated images. Observers' detectionperformance improved with practice. This improvementwas not contingent upon observers receiving feedbackalthough there was a trend for observers who receivedtrial by trial feedback to exhibit better overallperformance. !18